Institutions such as colleges, universities, other schools and businesses often utilize self-administered or take-home tests because of the increased flexibility and convenience they afford. Under current self-administered test regimes, organizations are required to either trust the examinees to not cheat or otherwise violate the testing rules or utilize a remote online proctor to manually monitor examinees or test-takers via webcam transmitted images or data transmitted over network connection webcams. The first approach of simply trusting examinees and test-takers provides no safe guard against potential dishonesty while the second approach of using one or more remote proctors is resource intensive and not scalable.
Remote proctoring or monitoring utilizing a computer's webcam and audio systems to facilitate manually watching and monitoring an examinee throughout the test is impractical and non-scalable for a number of reasons. For example, a proctor can monitor multiple webcam feeds simultaneously but audio feeds from each of the multiple systems cannot be monitored accurately because background noise from any one examinee can suppress or overwhelm the audio feeds from the remaining systems. Manual monitoring may further be hampered by network or communication bandwidth limitations. Bandwidth limitations can create a bottleneck when audio and video information are transmitted from multiple systems to the location of the proctor for monitoring. In particular, the bandwidth available at the proctor side limits the number audio and video feeds from examinees that can be simultaneously monitored. Finally, manual monitoring of a large number of video screens may be hampered by the proctor's ability to multitask and focus. For example, continuously monitoring a large number of examinees while resolving any questions or issues with the exam reduces and divides the proctors attention and focus on any single task. This reduced focus, in turn reduces the effectiveness of the overall monitoring process and procedure.
Because of the above-discussed scalability problems inherent in manual remote proctoring, a proctor only monitors a small number of examinees at a time (about 2 to 4 examinees per proctor per test). This type of proctor-intensive monitoring is expensive because the supply of trained professionals who can comfortably use conferencing/proctoring software system is limited. Moreover, manual monitoring tends to interfere with an examinees test experience because the downloading and saving of test data and the transport or communication of a video stream can severely limit network performance and drain network resources.